January 25, 2018

#ReleaseTheMemo suffers it's own diversionary tactics claims

The background is apparently black and white: either president Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, or Hillary Clinton, former president Obama and the FBI and Justice Department colluded to discredit then candidate Donald Trump from having a chance to win the 2016 presidential election.

The memo in question is explained pretty well by the NeverTrump (and formerly august publication) The National Review:

Over the last several days, online debate has centered around a memorandum drafted by Devin Nunes and House Intelligence Committee staff that allegedly details surveillance abuses in the American intelligence community. When the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo trended on Twitter, Democrats suspected possible help from Russian bots, but preliminary reports on Twitter’s internal analysis, according to the Daily Beast, suggest that the “groundswell . . . appears thus far to be organically American — not Russian propaganda.” More than 200 members of Congress, nearly all of them Republican, have seen the four-page memo, but Republicans are reportedly refusing to share it with the Department of Justice.

The diversionary tactic regarding the memo (which is claimed to be a diversionary tactic), is that Russian bots are behind the trending hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. They're not Russian bots and to say so is the very diversionary tactic they are accusing the memo to be.

On Tuesday, two Democratic leaders urged Facebook and Twitter to conduct an “in-depth forensic examination” of #ReleaseTheMemo to determine the extent of Russian propaganda promoting the hashtag. They relied on a report from the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy claiming that #ReleaseTheMemo was had become the favorite hashtag of Russian-sponsored Twitter accounts. (The report did not make any judgements about such activity on Facebook.)

“If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, two California Democrats, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

But a knowledgeable source says that Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

All of this would be solved by releasing the memo, after all, the details are so explosive as to be a bigger deal and worse than Watergate. Ironically, the Democrats turning Russia into a bogeyman, may indeed be helping Russia as it continues to paralyze Washington.